These days, your nightmares are likely populated with adult anxieties like forgetting a work deadline or showing up to a meeting sans clothing. But travel back to the bedtime hours of youth and we suspect your mind took you to far more grisly terrain, from windswept graveyards to abandoned amusement parks, sometimes with little hope of going back.

We wouldn't hesitate to say that in the kingdom of the nightmare, kids reign supreme. Their unbridled, and often quite disturbing, imaginations conjure images more deranged than horror film's most bloodcurdling visions. Just ask photographer Arthur Tress, who, in the late 1960s and early '70s, asked...